US secondhand/thrift store market

It is a curious fact about the universe that as professional football players have begun earning money in quantities that would make a small nation's GDP blush, Americans have simultaneously developed an almost religious devotion to buying other people's old trousers. One might expect these trends to move in opposite directions—that as wealth concentrates at the top, the rest of us would stop haunting the Goodwill. Instead they move together like a couple who have never met but keep arriving at the same bus stop. This suggests either that the universe has a particularly dry sense of humor, or that we are all much better at pattern-spotting than pattern-understanding.

What we're probably watching here is the long shadow of economic expansion and contraction sweeping across both markets like a weather system nobody saw coming. Between 2012 and 2023, the US economy did what economies do—it grew unevenly, with certain sectors booming while others treaded water. NFL salaries track professional sports revenue, which tracks disposable income and entertainment spending, which tracks overall economic health. Meanwhile, the thrift store market has been riding a wave of genuine cultural shift: younger shoppers treating secondhand shopping as both environmentally virtuous and fashionably unavoidable, while simultaneously entire economic cohorts have had their discretionary spending capacity expand or contract depending on which side of the recession they landed. Consider that between 2012 and 2023, the thrift market roughly doubled in size to nearly $40 billion annually, while the average NFL salary climbed from $1.9 million to $4.5 million. Both are essentially measuring the same underlying tremor in the economy—how much money people have, and what they choose to do with it.

The correlation between thrift store revenue and NFL salaries is not evidence that paying quarterbacks more causes Americans to buy used sweaters, nor the reverse. It is, however, rather excellent evidence that nearly everything in an economy is secretly connected to everything else, which is either profoundly wise or completely useless depending on whether you're trying to predict the future or just trying to make sense of the present. Two unrelated markets, moving in perfect synchrony, asking us nothing except to consider whether we're living in a system or a story. Perhaps both.